Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told his soccer-crazy countrymen that he had contacted the Optus CEO, Mr. Allen Lew, personally to join in their criticism of the coverage of the World Cup, which was met with many outages during the opening days of the tournament.

Mr. Turnbull tweeted a few hours ago: “I have spoken with the Optus CEO, Allen Lew. He assures me he is giving the World Cup streaming problems his personal attention and he believes it will be fixed this evening.”

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I have spoken with the Optus CEO, Allen Lew. He assures me he is giving the World Cup streaming problems his personal attention and he believes it will be fixed this evening.</p>&mdash; Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) <a href="https://twitter.com/TurnbullMalcolm/status/1008557252037365760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 18, 2018</a></blockquote>

Mr. Lew had been forced to apologize to Socceroos fans on Sunday after broadband streaming problems marred coverage of the tournament’s opening games.

Optus blamed the dropouts in its service on “an extremely high number of viewers logging into our platforms just before kick-off causing some systems to overload”.

Disruptions in the feed had become apparent already during the opening event show (see our related coverage) and continued over the first match to be shown exclusively on Optus, which was Uruguay against Egypt, on Friday night in Australia.

Optus CEO Mr. Lew stated: “I apologize unreservedly to all Australians. We should have done better, we can do better and we will do better.”